The Hearse You Came in On (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries)

by Tim Cockey

  I had a beef with Professor Smollett. As an inferior ape myself, I considered it patently unfair that while I had to preen and prance and bring forth great gushes of charm and cajolings in order to get the occasional Frostburg coed to go to bed with me, Alfred Smollett and his rice-paddy hair weave could sit back in his dusty little office and pull off his celebrity Svengali game with much less effort and considerably better success overall. I’m not accusing all the Frostburg women of mindlessly goose-stepping into the creep’s bed, mind you. But fledgling coeds are easy targets for creeps like Smollett. It was a game for him. Shooting fish in a barrel.

  It especially irked me when he aimed his disgusting old pistol at Angela Poe. That was my beef. Angela Poe was the sweetest, shyest, doe-eyed girl/woman you could ever hope to have a silly crush on. She was in one of Smollett’s classes with me. Sophomore year. I can’t speak for fish or koalas or spider monkeys, but men fantasize. And it’s not always just whips and chains. My classroom fantasies about Angela Poe were pure enough to stuff a cloud with. Angela Poe didn’t even know how pretty she was, or how her quiet voice and her large dark eyes and her nervous smile made me want to set up police barricades around her desk so that I could warn everyone to just stay away, move on please, let this one pass through. Fantasies, like I say. We get them. Angela Poe was the perfect virgin and I wanted her to stay that way, haughty presumptive idiot that I was. The difference between me and Alfred Smollett was that he didn’t want her to stay that way.

  And she didn’t. And that was my beef.

  The day that I saw Angela Poe sitting in class with a faraway look of shock and shame on her pretty face, I knew that something terribly abrupt and life-altering had taken place. I suspected that I knew the source. When I saw the look that flickered between Angela Poe and the great professor as he strode into the room… I knew what had happened to her and with whom.

  But that was a day for me to react, if I so chose. Not Hutch.

  But it was Hutch, loyal Hutch, who got hold of the same van we had used to squire around the Brahma bull. It was Hutch who got Alfred Smollett from behind and taped a bandanna over his eyes and hustled him into the van. And it was Hutch who drove the randy professor around for hours, haranguing him on a bullhorn—compliments of the Athletic Department. “You fuck with them, I’ll fuck with you!” The bullhorn—aided by a slight German accent—disguised his voice sufficiently. Alfred Smollett sat balled up in the rear of the van, helpless. Hutch never once mentioned Angela Poe by name, but Smollett must have gotten the point. Hutch spent several hours bouncing his amplified voice off the thin tin of the van, reviling Alfred Smollett up, down and through the middle for leading young innocents into his bed. He jerked the van wildly, sending his captive flopping helplessly from one side of the van to the other.

  Hutch had me keeping tabs on a piece of paper. He wanted exactly one hundred “I’m sorrys” from Alfred Smollett before he would let him go. The first twenty or so were arrogant and contentious. But Hutch was good with that bullhorn. He got spooky. He got the good old professor pretty rattled. By the seventieth “I’m sorry,” there were tears flowing from under the bandanna. By ninety he was all-out blubbering. By the time Smollett reached one hundred, I was practically sick to my stomach. Hutch pulled the van over in front of a sorority house and dumped the old goat onto the sidewalk. I watched him through the side mirror as we pulled away.

  “You happy?” Hutch asked, beaming from ear to ear like the Cheshire cat. “He really pissed you off, didn’t he? You feel better now? Huh?”

  I sure as hell didn’t. I felt sick to my stomach. That kind of loyalty I can do without.

  Sally was waving something in front of my face. It was her hand.

  “Earth to Hitchcock. Are you there?”

  It took a few fat seconds for me to travel back from the Frostburg campus of yesteryear to the noisy world of today’s Screaming Oyster. A few barstools down, Edie Velvet casually launched an empty beer bottle into the overhead dinghy. Another bottle leaped free from the boat and hit the floor with a pop, shattering green glass everywhere.

  “Sure, Sally, I’m here.”

  “Where the hell were you just now?”

  “I was just thinking,” I said.

  Sally snorted. She reached under the bar and slammed a handful of darts onto the counter. “Go throw some darts, son. Shake it off. Do your heavy thinking elsewhere.”

  It was sound advice. I took up the darts and headed over to the dartboard. I was annoyed with myself for having dredged up the memory of Hutch and his oversized “favor” to me. I remembered how ashamed I had felt the next day to even glance at Angela Poe. And of course the Laughing Gods just can’t resist the temptation to have their fun. It was that very next day that Angela Poe had approached me with some sort of question about an upcoming exam. It was a trumped-up question, simply an excuse to get me into a conversation. She liked me. And all I could do was mutter a half-assed answer to her question and walk away.

  Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

  I threw some darts. No bull’s-eyes. A biker type with an oversized mustache yelled over at me from his table.

  “You stink, man!”

  “I’m trying to miss the little spot in the middle,” I answered back. “It’s not so easy.”

  The guy tugged on one end of his mustache. “In that case, man, you’re pretty good.”

  I wasn’t completely obeying Sally’s advice. I was still thinking. And I didn’t much care for where it was taking me. The longer I considered the possibility that Amanda Stuart had murdered Guy Fellows, the more likely it seemed to me that Joel Hutchinson could not be out of the loop. If I knew … or at least had good cause to speculate, then there was no way in hell that Hutch hadn’t scratched his chin about the same thing. This was the candidate’s wife, after all. And Hutch was the candidate’s puppet master.

  But there was something even more unsettling than the thought that maybe Amanda Stuart had blood on her hands or that perhaps Hutch had helped her to clean it off. I was still seeing young Hutch’s smiling face as he hit the accelerator. “You happy? Do you feel better now?”

  Mr. Fix-it. I didn’t care one bit for that.

  I flipped the dart into my opposite hand and chucked it. I didn’t even look at the target. But the Laughing Gods were on duty. It was a perfect bull’s-eye.

  The grizzly guy was laughing so hard it turned into a coughing fit. But not before he had roared, “Oh, man, now you really stink!”

  CHAPTER 15

  Life goes on. Death too.

  We buried the guy who had choked to death having altogether too much fun all by himself. Rather than the usual intonations of “He was such a good person,” Parlor Two was filled with the dead guy’s buddies snickering to each other, “What a jerk.”

  You really had to feel for his parents.

  What a jerk.

  After the burial, since I was in the neighborhood, I stopped by the grave of Carolyn James. Cheap Guy Fellows had arranged for the smallest of stones, the simple rectangle tucked into the earth. No headstone. The grass over the grave was still lime-colored. In about a week or two, three weeks at the tops, the grass would lose its new-sprung sheen and Pops and company would crisscross it with their mowers. At that point, the grave of Carolyn James would be just another among a thousand.

  I went back to the grave site of the foolish sex addict. Pops and his boys were lowering the casket into Mother Earth. I intervened when one of them started to filch the casket’s bouquet and took it over to the grave of Carolyn James and set it down on her little gravestone. Twenty-seven years old. What makes a person who has only lived twenty-seven years want to turn out the lights? How could the great dark void come to look like a viable alternative to life? Well, I’m no Philosopher King, so I knew about how far I would get trying to pluck answers to those kinds of questions out of the air. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to generalize anyway. Carolyn James’s reasons were specific to her. She had run out of options, or at lea
st she had run out of the ability to recognize any options. And so she had hopped into her car, turned the key and hightailed it to nowhere. Final Destination.

  I drove out to Loch Raven Reservoir, about a half hour’s drive, parked at a turnoff by the woods, hiked a quarter of a mile in to the cliffs, stripped down to my boxers and dove in. In my mind’s eye it was a perfect Tarzan dive, strong and straight and lithe. To the less biased I probably looked like a large frog being tossed off the cliff. I hit the water and found no alligators to wrestle, so I swam out to the middle of the reservoir and then back again. It took me about forty minutes round-trip. When I pulled myself up onto one of the large boulders at the edge of the water, I was exhausted and pleased. I stretched out on the boulder and let the clouds entertain me for a while. A hawk circled overhead. A chipmunk skittered nearby. The wind cooled me; the sun warmed me. I was nearing a Perfect Moment experience when a county cop in an electric-powered boat veered into my little cove and laid down the law about no swimming in the reservoir. He was nice enough about it. Young guy. Acne scars. I made my way back up the cliff, back to my car, and drove back into the city. As I got off the expressway a car in front of me was drifting into my lane. I leaned hard on the horn.

  Welcome back, bubba.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kate and I met at Haussler’s Restaurant on Eastern Boulevard. Haussner’s is a huge restaurant—two very large rooms—that manages nonetheless to force a sense of intimacy down your throat by filling every square corpuscle of wall space with paintings. Stacked as many as nine and ten high, Haussner’s walls constitute a remarkable gallery of totally adequate canvases, paintings of forgotten royalty, gentry, both landed and debauched, wild-eyed rustics, pastoral glens, ships at sea and still lifes of all sorts, from fruit bowls to dead rabbits hanging by their bloody paws. The great charm of the place though, oddly enough, lies in its unstuffiness. The waiters and waitresses are about as pretentious as a beer bottle. Baltimore doesn’t do pretentious anyway nearly so well as it does bonhomie, and Haussner’s is a great example. Their menu is as extensive as their art collection; two entire pages of choices typewritten onto hard pink paper, no less than fifty dinners to choose from, all of them ample and purportedly scrumptious.

  I got the finnan haddie. I always get the finnan had-die. It is located near the bottom of the right-hand page of the menu. My gaze just naturally dropped there the first time I ate here and so I ordered it and liked it and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

  Kate ordered the red snapper.

  “I’ve always wondered about the red snapper,” I lied.

  Kate seemed more relaxed than in any of our previous encounters. She pointed out a painting of a little boy with chalky white skin dressed in a Pagliacci outfit and dragging a small wooden boat on a string. What looked like a leather medicine ball sat off in the background, half obscured in shadow, next to a stuffed lion.

  “Who would think to paint something like that? It’s creepy.” Her eyes left the painting and found mine. “Speaking of creepy. How did you get into the funeral business anyway?”

  I had picked up the pepper shaker and rested it on the tines of my fork, which tilted the handle about forty-five degrees. If I had slammed down suddenly on the handle of my fork it would have launched the pepper shaker maybe as far as the next table, where an elderly couple sat sipping soup in silence. I didn’t. I demilitarized the shaker. Kate was waiting for my answer. I wasn’t in the mood to go into the business about my parents and the beer truck. It seemed that all Kate and I had talked about so far were those who were no longer with us. I wanted to leave my parents out of it.

  “It’s a family business,” I said finally.

  “Does it ever bother you? I mean, it must.”

  “Why should it? Undertakers are among the top three oldest professions, next to lawyers and prostitutes. And we don’t have to hustle for business.”

  Kate laughed. I couldn’t be certain, but I believed it was the first time I had seen her laugh. I mean truly laugh, without that caution of hers I had already come to recognize sliding instantly into place.

  “You have a pretty laugh,” I observed.

  “Thank you.” She added, “So do you in fact.”

  Pretty? Well. I’ve never heard that one.

  “Tell me about your marriage,” Kate said. “I’m sorry. That’s abrupt. I mean, about…”

  Suddenly she was blushing.

  “What? My divorce?”

  “Forget I said anything. Really. It’s none of my business.”

  “I’ll tell you what. You can ask me any questions you want, anything at all…”

  Kate picked up on my tone. “But what?”

  “But first you’ve got to get the elephant out of the room. I want to know about Carolyn James. I want to know why you were pretending to be her. I want to know why she killed herself. I want to know why you tried to arrange her funeral before she was even dead.”

  Kate gave me an unhappy look. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  Kate fiddled with her silverware. “All right. To your first question … Carolyn was in fear for her life. She was scared to death. Literally, as it turned out.”

  “Who was she afraid of? Fellows?”

  “She wasn’t afraid that Guy would kill her, if that’s what you mean. But he did hit her. He hit her a lot. He was very bad to her. And she was incapable of breaking free from him. It’s … Unfortunately, that’s often how it goes.”

  “But if she was afraid that someone was going to kill her and it wasn’t Guy Fellows, then who?”

  “The same people who killed Fellows.”

  “People?”

  “Person. Whatever. Carolyn was in a panic. I could see that. God, she was all alone here. No family. No real friends. The only person who she really counted on was Guy and he was using her as his punching bag. Abuse is the damnedest thing. You’d think that more people could simply walk away from it. Say ‘No, no more,’ and just leave. But the victim mentality, it’s insidious. And in Carolyn’s situation, there was more.”

  “More? More what?”

  “In addition to the abuse, Guy had involved her in … well, he had involved her in a situation that—I said this already—scared the hell out of her. I wanted to save her. Do you understand that? I wanted to save her.”

  I saw the woman across the table from me as a little girl, leaping over the body of her handcuffed father and into the arms of her rescuer, her hero cop.

  “I understand.”

  Our salads had arrived. We didn’t touch them.

  “So why didn’t you just get her away from Fellows?” I asked. “Get her out of town altogether.”

  Kate was shaking her head. “No good. Carolyn wasn’t simply being paranoid about her life being in danger. She was in danger. And she would have been tracked down. When it came down to it, she couldn’t really hide. That was the problem. There was no real way out.”

  It hit me just then. At least a part of it. “You wanted to fake a funeral. That’s what you were after that day, wasn’t it? You wanted to pretend that Carolyn James was dead so that not only could she disappear, but no one would go looking for her.”

  Kate picked up her fork and pointed it at me. “That is exactly the stupid idea that I had.”

  “I don’t know, Kate. It sounds inspired.”

  “Could I have pulled it off?”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “Then we’re back to stupid.”

  She poked at her salad. Came up with a cherry tomato. “It was an impulsive thought, Hitch. When I came to your place I… I just needed to think. I was really not having such a great day myself. I was trying to sort out a lot of things. I ended up down in your neck of the woods and I happened to see people going into this funeral home. I got this crazy idea. What if people were to think that Carolyn had killed herself? It certainly wasn’t beyond imagining. As we now know. And the next thing I knew I was sta
nding behind a bunch of flowers staring down at a man in a coffin.”

  “Who wanted to kill her? Who did she need to run from? You’re a cop. Why didn’t she just ask you for help?”

  “Carolyn didn’t know I was a cop.”

  “Who did she think you were?”

  Kate lowered her eyes. “She thought I was Guy Fellows’s lover. Or I guess you ought to say, one of them.”

  “Were you?”

  Our meals arrived just then. My finnan haddie came with a swirl of garlic mashed potatoes and a tiny gathering of broccoli and carrots. As always. Kate’s red snapper looked delicious. It spanned the entire length of the plate, had been deboned and was opened up like an unzipped jacket. We each got a tiny plate stacked with lemon slices. We also each got an iced tea. Kate’s fish came with a side of rice. At Haussner’s they don’t offer to pepper mill your food for you. They figure you’re old enough to handle that yourself.

  Kate looked across the table at me as the flavors rose into our faces.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I remember chewing the finnan haddie. I just don’t remember tasting it.

  Kate refused to discuss Guy Fellows or Carolyn James anymore over dinner.

  “Hitch, I need a break. Can we make this a real date?”

  “You mean you want me to pay for everything and then kiss you good night at your door?”